Carol's Corner Office

After you enter text, numbers or a formula into a cell, you may need to change it. You can always retype the entry, if it's short. If it's long, you can easily edit it instead. One way to do this is to click in the formula bar and make changes. When ... the mouse pointer is over the formula bar, it appears as an I-beam, which looks like a capital I. This makes it easy for you to click between letters to place the insertion point where you want to begin making corrections. Sometimes it's easier to make a minor change to the contents of a cell rather than start over from scratch. You can edit the ... (view more)

If you're tired of reformatting Excel cells over and over with the same format, then take heart because you don't have to any longer! If you want to format each cell containing a sum total with a single line top border and a double-line bottom ... border you can do that! If you want the total results to be in currency format you can do that too! To create a style that will automatically format these cells for you, follow these steps: Click on one of the total cells in your worksheet. Go to Format | Style. In the Style name box, type Total cell. Click Modify. Under the Number tab, select Currency ... (view more)

After you've built a budget for a single period of time, you often have to repeat the process for several other time periods, say the next month, quarter or year. MS Excel provides the AutoFill feature to copy text, numbers and formulas to adjacent ... cells. You can also use the feature to create a sequence. AutoFill saves you the trouble of typing the same text, numbers and formulas repeatedly. Copy Data The active cell is surrounded by a bold rectangle, and on the lower-right corner is a small black square called the fill handle. Select the cell you want to copy. Place the mouse pointer over ... (view more)

When you make a small mistake in entering data in a cell using MS Excel, you can easily retype, but if you make a larger error, such as clearing cells by mistake, you need to use the Undo feature. Undo brings back the information that you thought ... was gone. Excel keeps a record of changes you make to your worksheet, and you can choose to undo the last one -- or as many as you want -- in reverse order. Then if you change your mind and want to do the changes again, you can simply use Redo. Undo only works on changes that you've made during the current session, so you can't undo procedures if you ... (view more)

After your document is finally finished and formatted just the way you wanted, you often have to send it to another person who is collaborating with you on the document. When it comes back to you, sometimes it doesn't have the same formatting as ... when you last saved it. If a document comes to you single spaced with no line spacing between the paragraphs, rather than clicking at the end of each paragraph and pressing [Enter], you can add line spacing to the entire document in two easy steps: Press Ctrl+A. Press Ctrl+0 (zero). MS Word adds a 12-point line space before each paragraph, which is ... (view more)

A vCard presents contact information as an electronic business card that can be sent via e-mail. vCards are based on an open standard, allowing any application that supports vCards to share contact information. In addition to sending a vCard as an ... attachment, you can also include it with your message signature. When you receive a message with a vCard attached, a paper clip icon appears in the preview pane to indicate the attachment. Use one of the following methods to add the data in the vCard as a contact entry: From the preview pane, select the paper clip icon and click the filename that ... (view more)

You can create a budget in MS Excel and track your expenses. To make your budget more readable, you must format it, or change its appearance. To do this, you can click buttons on the Formatting toolbar. If you've used Word or PowerPoint, several of ... these buttons are already familiar to you. You can: Widen columns so that all the text appears. Add dollar signs to help the reader know you are talking about money, and add commas to make it easy to read numbers over 1,000. Make some headings stand out by making them bold or italic, and separate numbers from the total by underlining. The ... (view more)

When you have a picture selected, you can use buttons on the Picture toolbar to change it from color to black and white and adjust the contrast and brightness. Click the Image Control button and choose Grayscale, Black ... (view more)

There are plenty of tools you can rely on to perform sophisticated or complex calculations, but MS Word offers a command that can be handy when you just need to sum a few numbers without opening another software application. The command is Tools | ... Calculate, and although it doesn't appear on any toolbars, it's very easy to add. Choose Tools | Customize (or double-click an empty spot on any tool bar) to open the Customize dialog box. Click the Commands tab and choose All Commands from the Categories list box. Click in the Commands list box and scroll down to select ToolsCalculate Drag the ... (view more)

Have you noticed wavy red or green underlines under certain words in a document? That's the sign that MS Word's automatic spelling checker (red) and grammar checker (green) are at work. MS Word has flagged these items as possible mistakes, allowing ... you to see at a glance where possible errors are. Office has an extensive dictionary against which it checks all the words in your document. Whenever it finds a word that is not in its dictionary, it flags the word with a red wavy underline. Proofreading a document is time-consuming, and it's easy to miss finding mistakes in your own writing. ... (view more)